Friday, May 17, 2024
That whooshing noise
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Drowning in words
I'm surrounded by silence but at the same time I am drowning in words and it hardly ever leaves me, that sense of disconnection.
Anthony Horowitz, A Line to Kill
Anthony Horowitz |
A writer, he says, is "surrounded by silence" and "drowning in words" at the same time. Writing tends to be a solitary occupation, best done alone in a quiet place, yet words rush constantly through the writer's mind, not just while writing but at other times, as well.
Novelists imagine conversations they cannot hear. They describe things they cannot see, at least not at the time they are writing. They are drowning in words, even those writers who in real life are introverts with little to say.
Monday, May 13, 2024
Brilliance
Hawthorne is a former police investigator who lost his job after being suspected of pushing a crime suspect down a flight of stairs. Yet because he is such a better detective than those on the force, he is called in to assist with tough cases. Horowitz plays the role of Hawthorne's bumbling Watson who tags along to observe and eventually write about the investigator's brilliance.
This time the pair are invited to a book festival on the island of Alderney, where residents brag there has never been a murder. Yet there are two puzzling murders during the few days they are on the island. Why anyone would commit a murder while a famous detective is on the scene is one mystery that remains unsolved in this novel.
The guests at this festival become suspects after a wealthy party host is found stabbed to death. Later the body of his wife is found. Yet the main suspect appears to be a man named Derek Abbott, the very man, a suspected dealer in kiddie porn, whom Hawthorne supposedly pushed down those stairs. Yet this seems too easy, both for the reader and for Horowitz, who wonders if he can even turn this case into a book.
The final solution, of course, proves more interesting and more satisfying, thanks to Hawthorne's brilliance as a detective and Horowitz's brilliance as a writer.
Friday, May 10, 2024
Love and death
Wednesday, May 8, 2024
Attitudes change, novels don't
Times change, attitudes change, moral positions change, yet great novels stay the same, and therein lies a problem for many readers. The same is true of movies, of course, but let's stick with novels.
The novelist Richard Ford, for example, was paid in advance to write an introduction to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. He thought he should read this novel he loved once again. "And I found things in it that I didn't want to have to argue for," he said. He then declined to write the introduction and sent the money back. He still loved the novel, he said, but he didn't want to be caught in the middle of the inevitable criticism by cultural critics about the novel's outdated points of view.Many, if not most, novels from earlier eras reflect attitudes toward women, people of other races, etc, that once were commonplace but now seem objectionable. I still like to read Donald E. Westlake's comic crime novels on occasion, but I now cringe at some of the attitudes reflected in them.
Yet I also find objectionable many of the attitudes found in so many modern novels. Perhaps worst of all are the modern attitudes found in so many historical novels being written today. Authors want their heroes in stories set in the 1930s or 1860s or whenever to think and behave like most of their readers do in the 2020s. It just makes their characters seem phony, unrealistic. Yet too much historical accuracy would certainly decrease book sales, assuming such books could even be published at all.
Some balance is required by both writers and readers. For writers, that may mean softening, without eliminating, the faults common even in the best people of earlier times. For readers, that means accepting novels as they are, whether or not one accepts the views of its characters.
One doesn't have to admire Humbert Humbert to admire the novel about Humbert Humbert. Novelist Donna Tartt has called Lolita her favorite novel. When asked if changing attitudes had changed her opinion of the novel she replied, "I don't have an altered view of it. It's a masterpiece." Good for her.
Monday, May 6, 2024
The science of prayer
McTaggart, who begins by describing herself as "a hard-nosed reporter," more often uses the term intention than prayer, perhaps to give her work a more scientific air. Her thesis is that a group of people — eight being an ideal number, she finds, though sometimes her groups number in the thousands — can lead to physical healing, decreased crime rates, improved relationships and even peace in war zones when everyone intends at the same time that such things take place.
Her early work took the form of actual scientific experiments, complete with control groups. Her groups intended that certain plants grow at a faster rate than other plants, and that is exactly what happened. In what she calls the Peace Intention Experiment, a large number of people around the world all focusing on peace in Sri Lanka at the same time led to a sudden decrease in hostilities there in 2008. "This was like entering another dimension," she writes.
The author reports scores of positive results from her Power of Eight groups. Here is a partial list: "Kristi's digestive issues disappeared; Marie began attracting new tax clients with no effort; Bev reconciled with her estranged brothers; Iris's chronic congestion began clearing up; Martha's insomnia completely resolved." Individually none of these occurrences could be described necessarily as a miracle. Taken as a group these and countless other examples make one wonder.
Yet the benefits of intention or prayer fall not just on the targets of these intentions and prayers but also on members of those groups. She calls it the Mirror Effect. "Focusing on healing someone else brings on a mirrored blessing." It helps explain, she writes, why people who attend church services regularly on average live seven years longer than those who don't.
Hers is a remarkable book, one that will tempt readers to conduct their own experiments in prayer.
Friday, May 3, 2024
Something in common
Set in Georgia in 1932, the Depression well under way and jobs hard to find, Del is a womanizing young man who has a relationship with the wrong man's wife. That man is his boss, who in revenge gives Del the dangerous job of climbing inside a grain bin to break up the corn inside. But then his boss opens the door at the bottom of the bin, letting the corn run out and causing Del to get buried. Later he can remember watching other men trying to rescue him, even though his unconscious body is buried in corn.
Now having lost his interest in women, becoming the first of our saints, he ends up working on a turpentine farm with a boss even more savage than his previous one. Any man Crow doesn't like and or who he doesn't think is working hard enough he puts in a small sweat box for days at a time. Del is one of these victims, though he manages to survive, unlike some others.
Meanwhile Rae Lynn Cobb kills her badly injured husband in a desperate act of mercy, then flees to Georgia and that same turpentine farm, where she gets a job by pretending to be a man named Ray Cobb. She can't keep up with the men and is placed in the sweat box for three days, where she has her own out-of-body experience.
Finally released and barely alive, she is discovered to be a woman. Cornelia, the abused wife of the storekeeper, brings her back to life and gives her a place in the store, against her husband's wishes.
The relationship between these two characters takes the entire novel to develop, through many hardships, all of which make it sweet and believable, the miracles notwithstanding.
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
Autoconfusion
"She recently had lost much with Rick and Pam."
That was a sentence in an otherwise clear email I received recently from a friend from high school. But what did it mean? What had been lost? What did Rick and Pam have to do with it? Instead of emailing back for an explanation, I decided to call my friend, Judy. Nothing had been lost, she told me. Linda, another high school friend, had simply had lunch with Rick and Pam, two other friends from high school.
It's nice to know that after more than 60 years, we Swanton Bulldogs remain connected, and also that Linda, Rick and Pam hadn't actually lost anything. So what happened in that email? Blame autocompletion.
When you are writing on a computer or phone, the device seems to look over your shoulder and try to complete your thoughts, correct your errors and save you trouble. Sometimes this works nicely and actually does save time and trouble. Other times it just gets you into more trouble, as in the above email. We can only imagine what series of typos and "corrections" turned "had lunch" into "had lost much," thanks to autocompletion, One needs to read over everything you have written with great care, which of course takes more time than autocompletion usually saves.
In his book Knowing What We Know, Simon Winchester calls autocompletion a "somewhat diabolical and wholly unnecessary nuisance, the bane of the writer's life."
Smilin' Ed and Froggy |
It was great fun. Then. Now I sympathize more with Smilin' Ed and Andy. Do we really need a Froggy the Gremlin in our phones and computers?